Participation Structures

Turns in education research (e.g. the turn in literacy studies mentioned in Chapter 3) from the quantitative and psycholinguistic to the social (Baynham and Prinsloo 2009) allowed for research to approach classroom talk as a socially mediated process. Parallel to Heath’s study on literacy events and socialization, Susan Philips argued that the organization of participation (i.e. who can participate, in what ways and in what

contexts), differs cross culturally (1993; 2011). In her work at the Warm Springs Indian Reservation school, Philips attempted to find an explanation as to why students from the reservation performed poorly in class relative to their non-Indian counterparts.

By observing interaction in the classroom at home and in school, she found that classroom talk was not just sequenced into structured forms of participation between teacher and student (acknowledging Mehan’s IRE structure) but that multiple structures emerged across these forms that were contextually dependent. In other words, although the structure of participants stayed the same insofar as the teacher remained the addressor (or initiator) and the student addressee (or respondent), how participation was structured (i.e. who can talk and when) changed within different social contexts.

For example, teachers can initiate an elicitation by asking a question to the entire class with the expectation or invitation that one student will raise their hand and answer. Alternatively, the teacher can address one student directly at their desk to ask the same question. Although the roles in each remain the same, the expectations of participation (who is invited to speak and when) changes.

Like Heath (1982), Philips found that these changes in “participant structures” was a socialized process. Furthermore, she found that Warm Springs students were socialized to participate differently within their own communities than they were expected to in the classroom. Teachers frequently defaulted to forms of participation (such as engaging the whole class to volunteer, or calling on an individual student) that Indian students were not inherently socialized into. For example, the idea of learning from making mistakes is one that the teacher assumed was beneficial, whereas the students did not want to

perform until they felt they had mastered the forms. They thus experienced these public displays as shaming (Philips 1993; 2011).

Although I was not able to compare participation structures used at home versus the classroom in my research, Philips units of analysis of participation structures became a robust way for me to show how certain interactions were not only overused but that where other forms of participation emerge, Arab-ESL students “performed” better in the target language but were not evaluated in the same way their performance in other

structures was evaluated. Furthermore, I show that in structures where Arab-ESL students were frequently expected to perform and be evaluated, their performance was more constrained than their Spanish-speaking counterparts by the reliance on textbooks and their inability to ask for clarification.

In her research, Philips (1993; 2011) identifies four basic structures of participation that are frequently used in the classroom:

Participant structure 1: The teacher engages the whole class or an individual student. Students may either be called on or volunteer answers by calling out or raising their hand. Participant structure 2: The teacher interacts with a few students in a small group setting, such as a reading group.

Participant structure 3: Students work independently at their desks but the teacher may still be available to answer questions.

Participant structure 4: Students are divided into small groups that they run independently Within my data, Participant Structure 1 is not only the most frequently used, but it is consistently deployed using the default IRE structure recognized by Mehan. Out of 48 identified participant structure interactions across three 25 minute exercises, the IRE sequence was used 39 times. In those 39 instances, the teacher called on Arabic-speaking students 16 times.

Although infrequent, only occurring a handful of times throughout the data, participant structures 2 and 4 proved to be moments where Arabic-speaking students in particular were able to produce more utterances in English than within IRE sequences. It is also important to note here that these moments frequently occurred outside of lessons where textbook exercises were relied on for elicitation.

Finally, I used a variation on Participant Structure 3 to identify moments when Arabic- speaking students exclusively used English to engage with the teacher in a one on one interaction. In my own assessment of this arrangement, desk-work was not the significant characteristic and instead, students used the target language to receive help from or engage in conversation with the teacher. I found this to be a useful category of participation as it illustrated moments when students used the target language in

interactions where they were (1) not being evaluated for their performance in the target language and (2) not responding within a textbook based IRE elicitation sequence. Drawing from ESL research that acknowledges these moments as having the potential to build fluency in English, I have labeled them “off-script” moments.

In the next two chapters, I use rich ethnographic accounts to frame the forms of participation and evaluation I witnessed followed by micro analysis across these different participant structures to elaborate on the variance in teacher-student interaction between Arab-ESL and Spanish-ESL students while also addressing the specific ways in which state standardization contributes to these forms.